Anyone who has ever laughed at the Dead
Alewives skits about Dungeons and Dragons will find themselves chuckling at nearly every line of dialogue in Grotesque Tactics 2. From the theme music from Quest for the Holy Grail when you talk to Holy Avatar to the nurse telling you to stop fondling the corpses when searching for loot, the game’s humour and wit is sure to keep you laughing. Grotesque Tactics 2 pokes fun at the RPG genre in general and takes more than a few pot shots at the MMO genre, as well. But for all the humor, the game is a surprisingly well put together RPG.
Graphical Eye Candy
The graphics in the game are very well done and remind me a lot of Sacred 2: Fallen Angel. While not quite on the level of Neverwinter Nights 2, the graphics in Grotesque Tactics 2 are extremely pleasant to look at. Unfortunately, the camera controls suffer from the exact same problems that you’ll encounter in Sacred 2, as well. You have control to zoom in and out, but are limited to a top down or 1/3 angled view of the dungeon. I find these limitations for the camera to be extremely annoying in any game. I have more than enough horsepower under the hood; I want to see the dungeon from any aspect I choose. The graphics options have settings for vertical sync and texture resolution, but have left out options for anti-aliasing and anisotropic settings. While this isn’t terrible, having options for at least AA would have been very nice, since this setting generally runs much smoother with in-game settings than it does by forcing it in your video driver. Thankfully, the graphics are smooth enough that there aren’t too many jaggy lines, so additional AA settings would have just been icing on the cake. One interesting addition to the graphics options is that the game natively supports a second monitor and this can be enabled or disabled with a check box.
